green-anarchism

By Brian Davey - Credo, July 31, 2016

What economists call “externalities” are not unusual or a special case, they are ubiquitous. They are rooted in private property and the relationships of market society. The way in which non market societies protect bio-diversity through totem arrangements is described.

Private property means that a single owner has the right to do with a resource as s/he sees fit. However, what they decide about these “resources” affect communities of people and communities of species (eco- systems). Very often, the effects are not positive. John Ruskin, a 19th century art critic who also wrote on economics, coined the term “illth” to describe the destructive effects imposed on society and the environment by the economy of his day.

Economists have had to adjust their theories and have come up with the concept of “externalities”, that is, the benefits or costs of an allocation decision that arise for non-owners. In a later chapter I critically examine the idea that these externalities can be managed by those people affected by them coming to a deal with those causing them. This would involve finding “the right price” for the externality and then doing a trade. The purpose of this chapter is to look at the institutional and property relationship contexts in which these “externalities” arise, and thus, to show how and why, in some kinds of society, there are no “externalities”.

The word “externality”, conveys the impression that this is a footnote to economic theory, a sort of additional point. Actually, externalities are ubiquitous. There cannot be any kind of resource allocation decision involving matter or energy without externalities. “The economy” is embodied and embedded in physical and energetic processes in the physical world.

It involves “stuff” processed by energy conversions. This stuff, the matter, can neither be created nor destroyed, though it can change its form. Likewise, energy changes its form when used. It follows from this that what are used as “economic resources” must have come from somewhere originally where these resources had an original function and/or were part of some other system or structure. These resources must also go somewhere after they are embodied in products and/or where they are wholly or partly turned into wastes. Extracting resources from places has consequences and dumping wastes and pollution has consequences. Over several centuries, this extraction and dumping has usually been out of, and back, into the commons.

By Alex V. Barnard - Discard Studies, June 6, 2016

“Seeing all the waste exposes very clearly the priorities in our society, that making a profit is more important than feeding people, than preserving the environment, than making use of resources, than honoring peoples’ time, labor, love, and effort. What we see with waste is that once something cannot make money, it is discarded and of no value.”

The denunciation above came from a member of the group “freegan.info,” a group which since 2005 has led “trash tours” through New York City with the aim of exposing and the wealth of waste produced by our food system and—as they claim—capitalism itself. While the freegan group I studied never had more than a dozen members, their evocations of “waste” echo widely across other contemporary movements. At Occupy Wall Street, authorities and activists battled over whether it was the occupiers or the financial system that were a waste of human effort and needed to “clean up” (Bolton, Froese, and Jeffrey 2016; Liboiron 2012). The encampments’ (re)use of waste and refuse, adopted the model of longer-running networks like Food Not Bombs: to repurpose capitalism’s detritus to provide food, housing, and transport for those living, voluntarily or involuntarily, on the margins of market society (Giles 2013; Heynen 2010).

Waste may be particularly symbolically and materially visible in contemporary anti-capitalism, but claims that capitalism is “wasteful” have haunted the economic system from the beginning. What the meaning behind movements’ evocations of “waste,” though, have varied across different capitalist “waste regimes” (Gille 2008): the configuration of modes of producing, representing, and politicizing waste that dominate in a particular historical moment. Only by seeing the long-running but evolving evolving politicization of capitalism’s waste can we see the specificity of how waste is used in contemporary anti-capitalist movements—which, in my new book (Barnard 2016), I describe in terms of the use of “ex-commodities” to challenge a neo-liberal “fetish of waste.”

By Chris Burnett - Counterpunch, May 13, 2016

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has yet to recognize, for scientific reasons, our current geological epoch as the Anthropocene, or “Age of Humans”. The term was coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 due to the fact that humans are changing the face of the planet, and are clearly responsible for the current 6th mass extinction event and climate disruption. Eco-radicals – black-red-green – might prefer the term Capitalocene, or the “Age of Capital”.

The former implies that humanity is an undifferentiated whole while the latter suggests that capital, and its system of class and power relations, are the real problem, the real driving force that has altered the planet so extensively. I prefer the latter, of course, for political reasons.

There is no substitute for understanding the historical forces of capitalism that has brought us to the edge. The logic of capitalism is grow or die, and we are all being dragged towards the die part. We need targets of accountability, and we need remedies for the dispossessed. There is a biological debt that must be paid by the most rapacious among us.

But yet, I am still sympathetic to the Anthropocene label because it makes me feel personally responsible. The collective “we”. There is something unsettling about it, and we all need to be immediately unsettled. It puts the burden of action on all of us, and counterintuitively, might pull us out of our comfortable anthropocentric worldview. Eco-radicals rightly put the blame at the doorstep of capitalism and the state, but we should all feel personally responsible, in our collective guts.

There are approximately 150-200 species going extinct everyday. The background rate of the normal extinction process is roughly one to five species a year. We are at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate today due to human activities. As far as the last members of a doomed species might be concerned, humans are responsible, not just the capitalist class. To them, it is the Anthropocene. Might your perspective on this issue be determined by which side of the axe you are on?

If I were to anthropomorphize those lost species, they might provide us an analogy to chew on. They might say, “imagine the surviving members of countless families murdered from bombs dropped by Bush, or assassinated with drones sent by Obama. Do you think they would care about the internal political dynamics of the US after such a tragedy?”

From the survivors perspective, it is the US government, the US Empire system, that killed their relatives. Our friends pondering this analogy for us might just make the same argument in regards to the human race: “yes, okay, we understand there are class distinctions. But, from our perspective, you are the problem. You are that system.”

I am reminded of Noam Chomsky’s use of the word “we” when discussing the crimes of empire. I recall feeling defensive when he implied we all had responsibility, because, well, I opposed imperialism! But I think he was right. In his 1967 essay, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, he writes, reflecting on Dwight Macdonald’s question as to what extent the people are responsible for their own government’s crimes,

“We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam… As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years – on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions.”

Continuing at the end of the essay,

“Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam – as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.”

That is the question we are all faced with today, “What have I done?”, as we observe fresh atrocities committed against the biosphere and all life on this planet. Only those that resist authority and capitalism have the right to condemn our modern death-camp paymasters.

Alnoor Ladha interviewed by Anna Bergren Miller - Shareable, February 18, 2016

The Rules is a worldwide network of activists working to transform the politico-economic structure undergirding global inequality. The network, which actively supports individual social movements while operating as a think tank, advocates radical reform focused on five strategic areas: money, power, secrecy, ideas, and the commons.

Last month, I spoke over Skype to The Rules founder Alnoor Ladha. Ladha filled me in on how The Rules operates on the ground, and on his own journey from reformer to revolutionary. We also spoke about the role of the city in neoliberalism, the part the sharing economy can play in rewriting "the rules," and why Donald Trump is emblematic of the challenges faced by anti-capitalist activists.

ABM: Tell me about The Rules. What is it?

AL: The Rules is a network of activists, writers, researchers, journalists, coders, hackers, and artists focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty, and climate change. We don't focus on the traditional development model, which is based on aid, charity, and sympathy. We focus [instead] on the drivers of these injustices, which are things like the tax justice system, the global economic operating system—essentially the rules that ensure that the current state of pillage and destruction is the logical outcome.

We do that in two ways. We have a campaigning arm, that supports and works with social movements from around the world—peasant movements, farmer movements, women's rights groups, indigenous groups—as well as a think-tank arm, that tries to get more progressive and radical ideas into the mainstream media.

What are your objectives, both short- and long-term?

On the campaigning side, a lot of it is about helping groups articulate how all oppression is connected. So we're not fighting a lands-rights struggle in India, and a tax-justice struggle in Kenya, and a climate struggle in Venezuela. These are all linked to the same driver—the same nemesis, if you will. Which is the logic of the neoliberal capitalist system.

When we connect the dots like that, from a media perspective, a storytelling perspective, and a campaigning perspective, it helps expose the bigger picture at work. That's a lot of what the campaigning work is about. And also linking these civil-society groups with each other. We're trying to build that organizing infrastructure.

What brought you to this work? Did you have an epiphany moment, or was it more of an evolution in your thinking?

You know, it's funny. I think part of the journey for me has been like a removal of veils.

I was socialized by the Canadian education system. Things are pretty good in Canada for the average person. And no one looks at the historical reasons why that is the case. So I think when you start going on the journey of understanding privilege, you start having these veils systematically removed.

My dad was exiled from Uganda in the early 1970s by Idi Amin. So I was sensitive to power, and interested in understanding political power. But I was never an activist in that traditional sense from a young age. I wasn't some kind of child prodigy. I was just curious and interested.

As I became more curious, I started to question the structures behind the system. Once you start to understand, for example, that Canada's wealth is dependent on resource extraction and, historically, is a byproduct of the British colonial system, then you start understanding [why you were] taught this certain version of history.

Going to university in Canada, this idea [existed] that somehow we should be grateful for the jobs we're given. But [there was] no real explanation of the debt-based financial system that requires us to work these bullshit jobs.

I started as a reformist in many ways, because I believed the Western myth of progress, which is: everything's getting better, and if we could just make slight tweaks in this current system, things would be better.

I was really interested in the idea of social enterprise for a couple of years. Then when you start to ask, "Who are things getting better for, and in what way are they getting better?" you realize that that Western myth of progress is total bullshit.

Of every dollar of wealth created, 93 cents goes to the top one percent since 1998. You can see why we're told that the only model for any social change is more economic growth, more foreign direct investment, more GDP increase. Very few people benefit from that, but those are the same people who dictate what economic policy and theory is.

Understanding that every dollar of wealth creates inequality, and every dollar of wealth heats up our planet—because we have a fossil fuels extractive-based system—you realize that there's no way that reforming this current system is going to change the quality of life for the majority of humanity. Quite the opposite. The more we improve the system, the more we're keeping in a vampiric system whose logical outcome will be the destruction of the planet.

By Nicholas Beuret - Novara Media, December 4, 2015

The activist part of me is pissed off at the French government for banning the protest marches that planned to target the UN Climate Change conference (known as the COP21) in Paris this December. It would have been amazing to see thousands of people taking to the streets demanding climate justice and breaking the stale grey commentary surrounding international climate change politics. That bit of me hopes the protests still go ahead.

But another part of me hopes no one turns up at all, and is actually glad the marches won’t happen. Not out of despair, or in some sneering ultra-left sense, but because the environmental movement is stuck and protests like the ones planned for the COP are part of the reason for the current impasse. I hope people don’t turn up because, in the end, spectacular protests such as these are making things worse.

Despite 20 years of activism…

We are heading towards a 3-4C global temperature rise. Despite creative actions, grassroots climate movements and committed NGO campaigns (and even some government action) climate change hasn’t been stopped. Sure enough, we shouldn’t dismiss what has been achieved. That climate change might be limited to 3-4C is actually an achievement, which has happened largely due to the campaigns of environmentalists and the emergence of a strong public belief that climate change has to be tackled by governments. But it’s not enough, not by a long shot. It is not enough according to the standards governments, scientists and activists hold themselves to. A 3-4C rise in global temperatures is actually disastrously bad.

The red line many in the climate movement have been pushing is a maximum increase of no more than 2C – a rise which is possibly too dangerous already. The maths of staying below 2C relies on global emissions peaking this year. What is becoming increasingly clear is that it is probably too late to stay below a 2C rise in global temperatures.

Despite 20 years of activism climate politics is stuck. Climate change is a problem so big, so complicated (everything has to change) and so urgent (it has to happen now, now, now) that for the most part the environmental movement finds itself with few options for action. Because climate change means changing everything, any progress on a small, local or even regional scale feels inadequate. Because it’s so complicated it seems resistant to democratic politics – just imagine what it is going to take to get everyone to agree on how we are going to solve the problem, even on a local scale. Because it’s so urgent there is no time for negotiating with people, a third of whom don’t think climate change is all that serious anyway. It is for all these messy, difficult reasons that climate change protests take the form of mass spectacular actions like the ones planned for the Paris COP21.

The COP21 protest isn’t so different to the actions that happened at COP15 in 2009, or any of the ones before that. It’s also not so different from Climate Camp or, going further back, most of the summit protests of the anti-globalisation movement. In each case you had a symbol of a global problem around which people could mobilise, and in each case you had no real opportunity to affect the thing being protested against. What happened in each case – and what will continue to happen – is what we could call ‘militant lobbying’. These actions were/are stunts intending to put pressure on governments to act, even when carried out in the name of anti-state politics or anti-authoritarian practice. They can’t be anything else.

While they are almost always billed as direct actions, what makes an action ‘direct’ is its capacity to disrupt or stop something without recourse to some other power. A useful example would be the anti-roads movement in the UK. The government of the day had scheduled a massive programme of road construction, often through existing neighbourhoods or woods. People banded together to form local campaigns against the specific roads, and created a number of action camps which physically blocked road construction. One by one the camps fell, but not before costing the government large sums of money and slowing the project down immensely. In the end the disruption became too much and the government cancelled most of the programme.

We can contrast the anti-roads movement with the planned actions at COP21. In Paris, at best they will block some delegates from leaving a meeting that will have concluded, the content of which will have largely been decided over the prior months of negotiations. Which means the planned protests won’t affect the outcome, and won’t affect climate change in any way directly either. The action is and can only be intended to put pressure on governments to make a stronger agreement. But then, given the scale, complexity and urgency of climate change, who else could possibly deal with it as an issue?

By Wayne Price - Anarkismo, December 3, 2015

Although he died in 2006, Murray Bookchin is recently in the news.  Staid bourgeois newspapers report, with apparent shock, that part of the Kurdish revolutionary national movement has been influenced by the ideas of Murray Bookchin, a U.S. anarchist (Enzinna 2015).  However, I am not going to discuss this development here. My topic is not how Bookchin’s political philosophy may apply to the Kurds in Rojava (important as this is), but how it might apply to the U.S.A. and other industrialized and industrializing countries.

Nor will I review the whole range of Bookchin’s life and work (see White 2008).   Bookchin made enormous contributions to anarchism, especially—but not only—his integration of ecology with anarchism.  At the same time, in my opinion, his work was deeply flawed in that he rejected the working class as playing a major role in the transition from capitalism to anti-authoritarian socialism.  Like many other radicals in the period after World War II, he was shaken by the defeats of the world working class during the ‘thirties and ‘forties, and impressed by the prosperity and stability of the Western world after the Second World War. Previously a Communist and then a Trotskyist, he now turned to a version of anarchism which rejected working class revolution.

This was not the historically dominant view held by anarchists.  Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Makhno, Goldman, Durrutti,  the anarcho-syndicalists and the anarcho-communists—they believed that  “anarchism is a revolutionary, internationalist, class struggle form of libertarian socialism…. Syndicalism [revolutionary unionism—WP] was a form of mass anarchism…and the great majority of anarchists embraced it.” (Schmidt & van der Walt 2009; 170)  For them, the “broad anarchist tradition” was “‘class struggle’ anarchism, sometimes called revolutionary communist anarchism….” (19)

However, in his 1969 pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!” (republished in Bookchin 1986; 195—242), Bookchin denounced “the myth of the proletariat.”  He wrote, "We have seen the working class neutralized as the ‘agent of revolutionary change,’ albeit still struggling within a bourgeois framework for more wages [and] shorter hours….The class struggle…has [been]…co-opted into capitalism…. " (202) The last collection of his writings repeats his belief, “…The Second World War…brought to an end to the entire era of revolutionary proletarian socialism…that had emerged in June 1848” (Bookchin 2015; 127). By an “era of revolutionary proletarian socialism,” he did not mean there had been successful workers’ revolutions, but that there had been mass working class movements (Socialist, Communist, and anarchist), with a number of attempted revolutions.

He wrote, “…The worker [is] dominated by the factory hierarchy, by the industrial routine, and by the work ethic….Capitalist production not only renews the social relations of capitalism with each working day…it also renews the psyche, values, and ideology of capitalism” (Bookchin 1986; 203 & 206). (Why these deadening effects of industrial capitalist production did not prevent the existence of a movement for “revolutionary proletarian socialism” for an “entire era” from 1848 to World War II, he did not explain.)

Bookchin did not deny that there still were workers’ struggles for better wages and shorter hours, but he no longer saw this low level class conflict as indicating a potential for a workers’ revolution.  Nor did he deny that workers might become revolutionary, but only, he said, if they stopped thinking of themselves as workers, focused on issues unrelated to their daily work, and regarded themselves as declassed “citizens.”